We measure the response of household spending to the economic stimulus payments (ESPs) disbursed in mid-2008, using special questions added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation arising from the randomized timing of when the payments were disbursed. We find that, on average, households spent about 12-30% (depending on the specification) of their stimulus payments on nondurable expenditures during the three-month period in which the payments were received. Further, there was also a substantial and significant increase in spending on durable goods, in particular vehicles, bringing the average total spending response to about 50-90% of the payments. Relative to research on the 2001 tax rebates, these spending responses are estimated with greater precision using the randomized timing variation. The estimated responses are substantial and significant for older, lower-income, and home-owning households. We further extend the literature in two ways. First, we find little evidence that the propensity to spend varies with the method of disbursement (paper check versus electronic transfer). Second, we evaluate a complementary methodology for quantifying the impact of tax cuts, which asks consumers to self-report whether they spent their tax cuts. The response of spending to the ESPs is indeed largest for self-reported spenders. However, self-reported savers also spent a significant fraction of the payments.

This paper analyzes how blockholders can exert governance even if they cannot intervene in a firm's operations. Blockholders have strong incentives to monitor the firm's fundamental value, since they can sell their stakes upon negative information. By trading on private information (following the "Wall Street Rule"), they cause prices to reflect fundamental value rather than current earnings. This in turn encourages managers to invest for long-run growth rather than short-term profits. Contrary to the view that the U.S.'s liquid markets and transient shareholders exacerbate myopia, I show that they can encourage investment by impounding its effects into prices.

This paper presents a unified theory of both the level and sensitivity of pay in competitive market equilibrium, by embedding a moral hazard problem into a talent assignment model. By considering multiplicative specifications for the CEO's utility and production functions, we generate a number of different results from traditional additive models. First, both the CEO's low fractional ownership (the Jensen-Murphy incentives measure) and its negative relationship with firm size can be quantitatively reconciled with optimal contracting, and thus need not reflect rent extraction. Second, the dollar change in wealth for a percentage change in firm value, divided by annual pay, is independent of firm size and therefore a desirable empirical measure of incentives. Third, incentive pay is effective at solving agency problems with multiplicative impacts on firm value, such as strategy choice. However, additive issues such as perk consumption are best addressed through direct monitoring.

Since Sandmo (1981), many articles have analyzed optimal fiscal policies in economies with tax evasion. All share a feature: they assume that the cost of enforcing the tax law is exogenous. However, governments often invest resources to reduce these enforcement costs. In a very simple model, we incorporate such investments in the analysis of an optimal fiscal policy. We characterize their optimal level and we show numerically how they interact with the other dimensions of the optimal fiscal policy. Finally, we highlight the differences between our results and those obtained in a model without investment in the tax administration.

The insurance for large downward moves in the asset prices provided by the out-of-the money put options is expensive relative to standard models. This suggests that investors are concerned with large negative moves in prices, which occur approximately once a year in the data; however, in the data there is no evidence for corresponding large moves in consumption at such frequencies. I present a long-run risks type model where economic inputs (consumption) are Gaussian, and the agent learns about the unobserved expected growth from the cross-section of signals using recency-biased belief-updating model. The uncertainty about expected growth (confidence measure), as in the data, is time-varying and subject to jumps. In the long-run risks setup, recency-biased learning and confidence risk fluctuations lead to large jump premia, which can explain option-price puzzles and large moves in returns in the absence of jumps in consumption. The estimation results suggest that the model provides a good fit to the data at plausible preference and model parameter values.

The demand for durable goods is more cyclical than that for nondurable goods and services. Consequently, the cash flow and stock returns of durable-good producers are exposed to higher systematic risk. Using the benchmark input-output accounts of the National Income and Product Accounts, we construct portfolios of durable-good, nondurable-good, and service producers. In the cross-section, an investment strategy that is long on the durable portfolio and short on the service portfolio earns a risk premium exceeding four percent annually. In the time series, an investment strategy that is long on the durable portfolio and short on the market portfolio earns a countercyclical risk premium. We develop a general equilibrium asset-pricing model, based on a two-sector production economy, to explain these empirical findings.

Empirical evidence suggests that banks hold capital in excess of regulatory minimums. This did not prevent the financial crisis and underlines the importance of understanding bank capital determination. Market discipline is one of the forces that induces banks to hold positive capital. The literature has focused on the liability side. We develop a simple theory based on monitoring to show that discipline from the asset side can also be important. In perfectly competitive markets, banks can find it optimal to use costly capital rather than the interest rate on the loan to commit to monitoring because it allows higher borrower surplus.

We develop a framework for estimating expected returns—a predictive system—that allows predictors to be imperfectly correlated with the conditional expected return. When predictors are imperfect, the estimated expected return depends on past returns in a manner that hinges on the correlation between unexpected returns and innovations in expected returns. We find empirically that prior beliefs about this correlation, which is most likely negative, substantially affect estimates of expected returns as well as various inferences about predictability, including assessments of a predictor's usefulness. Compared to standard predictive regressions, predictive systems deliver different expected returns with higher estimated precision.

We develop a simple model of the interbank market where banks trade a long term, safe asset. When there is a lack of opportunities for banks to hedge idiosyncratic and aggregate liquidity shocks, the interbank market is characterized by excessive price volatility. In such a situation, a central bank can implement the constrained efficient allocation by using open market operations to fix the short term interest rate. It can be constrained efficient for banks to hoard liquidity and stop trading with each other if there is sufficient uncertainty about aggregate liquidity demand compared to idiosyncratic liquidity demand.

This paper finds support for the hypothesis that overvalued firms create value for long-term share-holders by using their equity as currency. Any approach centered on abnormal returns is complicated by the fact that the most overvalued firms have the greatest incentive to engage in stock acquisitions. We solve this endogeneity problem by creating a sample of mergers that fail for exogenous reasons. We find that unsuccessful stock bidders significantly underperform successful ones. Failure to consummate is costlier for richly priced firms, and the unrealized acquirer-target combination would have earned higher returns. None of these results hold for cash bids.

I decompose inflation risk into (i) a component that is correlated with real returns on positive-net-supply securities (stocks, real estate, etc.) and factors that determine investor’s preferences and investment opportunities and (ii) a residual component. In equilibrium, only the first component earns a risk premium. Therefore investors should avoid exposure to the residual component. All nominal bonds, including the nominal money-market account, are equally exposed to the residual component except inflationprotected bonds, which provide a means to hedge it. Every investor should put 100% of his wealth in positive-net-supply securities and inflation-protected bonds and should finance every long/short position in nominal bonds with an equal amount of other nominal bonds or by borrowing/lending in the nominal money market account; i.e. investors should hold a zero-investment portfolio of nominal bonds and the nominal money market account.

The central insight of asset pricing is that a security's value depends on both its distribution of payoffs across economic states and state prices. In fixed income markets, many investors focus exclusively on estimates of expected payoffs, such as credit ratings, without considering the state of the economy in which default is likely to occur. Such investors are likely to be attracted to securities whose payoffs resemble those of economic catastrophe bonds--bonds that default only under severe economic conditions. We show that many structured finance instruments can be characterized as economic catastrophe bonds, but offer far less compensation than alternatives with comparable payoff profiles. We argue that this difference arises from the willingness of rating agencies to certify structured products with a low default likelihood as ''safe'' and from a large supply of investors who view them as such.

In this article the author draws parallels between the source material on the effects of law on the economic development of countries and on the effects of accounting standards on financial reporting outcomes. The main argument is that these materials are complementary in regard to what they reveal about understanding the effects of law, regulations, and accounting standards on economic and financial reporting outcomes. The material also suggests that U.S. securities laws and reporting standards have adopted a more regulatory direction over time. Attention is also given to the effects of the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) globally.

This paper empirically examines the benefits of relationship banking to banks, in the context of consumer credit markets. Using a unique panel dataset that contains comprehensive information about the relationships between a large bank and its credit card customers, we estimate the effects of relationship banking on the customers’ default, attrition, and utilization behavior. We find that relationship accounts exhibit lower probabilities of default and attrition, and have higher utilization rates, compared to non-relationship accounts, ceteris paribus. Such effects become more pronounced with increases in various measures of the strength of the relationships, such as relationship breadth, depth, length, and proximity. Moreover, dynamic information about changes in the behavior of a customer’s other accounts at the bank, such as changes in checking and savings balances, helps predict and thus monitor the behavior of the credit card account over time. These results imply significant potential benefits of relationship banking to banks in the retail credit market.

Regulations allow market makers to short sell without borrowing stock, and the transactions of a major options market maker show that in most hard-to-borrow situations, it chooses not to borrow and instead fails to deliver stock to its buyers. Some of the value of failing passes through to option prices: when failing is cheaper than borrowing, the relation between borrowing costs and option prices is significantly weaker. The remaining value is profit to the market maker, and its ability to profit despite the usual competition between market makers appears to result from a cost advantage of larger market makers at failing.

Using nationally representative data on consumption, we show that Blacks and Hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. These differences exist among virtually all sub-populations, are relatively constant over time, and are economically large. While racial differences in utility preference parameters might account for a portion of these consumption differences, we emphasize instead a model of status seeking in which conspicuous consumption is used as a costly indicator of a household’s economic position. Using merged data on race and state-level income, we demonstrate that a key prediction of the status-signaling model -- that visible consumption should be declining in reference group income -- is strongly borne out in the data for each racial group. Moreover, we show that accounting for differences in reference group income characteristics explains most of the racial difference in visible consumption.

Recurrent intervals of inattention to the stock market are optimal if consumers incur a utility cost to observe asset values. When consumers observe the value of their wealth, they decide whether to transfer funds between a transactions account from which consumption must be financed and an investment portfolio of equity and riskless bonds. Transfers of funds are subject to a transactions cost that reduces wealth and consists of two components: one is proportional to the amount of assets transferred, and the other is a fixed resource cost. Because it is costly to transfer funds, the consumer may choose not to transfer any funds on a particular observation date. In general, the optimal adjustment rule—including the size and direction of transfers, and the time of the next observation—is state-dependent. Surprisingly, unless the fixed resource cost of transferring funds is large, the consumer’s optimal behavior eventually evolves to a situation with a purely time-dependent rule with a constant interval of time between observations. This interval of time can be substantial even for tiny observation costs. When this situation is attained, the standard consumption Euler equation holds between observation dates if the consumer is sufficiently risk averse.

Are cities as politically polarized as states and countries? “No” is the answer from our regression discontinuity design analysis, which shows that whether the mayor is a Democrat or a Republican does not affect the size of city government, the allocation of local public spending, or crime rates. However, there is a substantial incumbent effect for mayors. We investigate three mechanisms that could account for the striking lack of partisan impact at the local level, and find the most support for Tiebout competition among localities within metropolitan areas.

Are excess returns predictable and if so, what does this mean for investors? Previous literature has tended toward two polar viewpoints: that predictability is useful only if the statistical evidence for it is incontrovertible, or that predictability should affect portfolio choice, even if the evidence is weak according to conventional measures. This paper models an intermediate view: that both data and theory are useful for decision-making. We investigate optimal portfolio choice for an investor who is skeptical about the amount of predictability in the data. Skepticism is modeled as an informative prior over the improvement in the Sharpe ratio generated by using the predictor variable. We find that the evidence is sufficient to convince even an investor with a highly skeptical prior to vary his portfolio on the basis of the dividend-price ratio and the yield spread. The resulting weights are less volatile, and, as we show, deliver superior out-of-sample performance compared with weights implied by diffuse priors, dogmatic priors, and ordinary least squares regression.

In this paper we offer direct evidence that financial intermediation does impact underlying asset markets. We develop a specific observable symptom of a banking system that underprices the put option imbedded in non-recourse asset-backed lending. Using a dataset for 19 countries and over 500 real estate investment trusts, we find that, following a negative demand shock, the "underpricing" economies experience far deeper asset market crashes than economies in which the put option is correctly priced.

We provide a comprehensive review of China’s financial system, and explore directions of future development. First, the current financial system is dominated by a large banking sector. In recent years banks have made considerable progress in reducing the amount of non-performing loans and improving their efficiency. It is important that these efforts are continued. Second, the role of the stock market in allocating resources in the economy has been limited and ineffective. Further development of China’s stock market and other financial markets is the most important task in the long-term. Third, the most successful part of the financial system, in terms of supporting the growth of the overall economy, is a non-standard sector that consists of alternative financing channels, governance mechanisms, and institutions. This sector should coexist with banks and markets in the future in order to continue to support the growth of the Hybrid Sector (non-state, non-listed firms). Finally, in order to sustain stable economic growth, China should aim to prevent and halt damaging financial crises, including a banking sector crisis, a real estate or stock market crash, and a “twin crisis” in the currency market and banking sector.

Regulators express growing concern over predatory loans, which the authors take to mean loans that borrowers should decline. Using a model of consumer credit in which such lending is possible, they identify the circumstances in which it arises both with and without competition. The authors find that predatory lending is associated with highly collateralized loans, inefficient refinancing of subprime loans, lending without due regard to ability to pay, prepayment penalties, balloon payments, and poorly informed borrowers. Under most circumstances competition among lenders attenuates predatory lending. They use their model to analyze the effects of legislative interventions.

The essence of structured finance activities is the pooling of economic assets (e.g. loans, bonds, mortgages) and subsequent issuance of a prioritized capital structure of claims, known as tranches, against these collateral pools. As a result of the prioritization scheme used in structuring claims, many of the manufactured tranches are far safer than the average asset in the underlying pool. We examine how the process of securitization allowed trillions of dollars of risky assets to be transformed into securities that were widely considered to be safe, and argue that two key features of the structured finance machinery fueled its spectacular growth. At the core of the recent financial market crisis has been the discovery that these securities are actually far riskier than originally advertised.

We examine equilibrium models based on Epstein-Zin preferences in a framework where exogenous state variables which drive consumption and dividend dynamics follow affine jump diffusion processes. Equilibrium asset prices can be computed using a standard machinery of affine asset pricing theory by imposing parametric restrictions on market prices of risk, determined by preference and model parameters. We present a detailed example where large shocks (jumps) in consumption volatility translate into negative jumps in equilibrium prices
of the assets. This endogenous ”leverage effect” leads to significant premiums for out-of-the-money put options. Our model is thus able to produce an equilibrium ”volatility smirk” which realistically mimics that observed for index options.

I analyze the links between intertemporal information acquisition and the dynamics of asset markets. In my model, investors are Bayesian learners that optimally choose how much to consume, how much to invest, and how much information to acquire. The model predicts that investors acquire more information in times when future capital productivity is expected to be high, the cost of capital is low, new technologies are expected to have a persistent impact on productivity, and the scalability of investments is expected to be high. My results shed light on the economic mechanisms behind various dynamic aspects of information production by the financial sector, such as the sources of variation in returns on information acquisition for investment banks or private equity funds.

Prior to 1863, state-chartered banks in the United States issued notes–dollar-denominated promises to pay specie to the bearer on demand. Although these notes circulated at par locally, they usually were quoted at a discount outside the local area. These discounts varied by both the location of the bank and the location where the discount was being quoted. Further, these discounts were asymmetric across locations, meaning that the discounts quoted in location A on the notes of banks in location B generally differed from the discounts quoted in location B on the notes of banks in location A. Also, discounts generally increased when banks suspended payments on their notes. In this paper we construct a random matching model to qualitatively match these facts about banknote discounts. To attempt to account for locational differences, the model has agents that come from two distinct locations. Each location also has bankers that can issue notes. Banknotes are accepted in exchange because banks are required to produce when a banknote is presented for redemption and their past actions are public information. Overall, the model delivers predictions consistent with the behavior of discounts.

We investigate the correlation between curb-side tree plantings and housing price movements in Philadelphia from 1998 to 2003, comparing two programs, one by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society that requires block-group effort that focuses on lowincome neighbourhoods and the other by the Fairmount Park Commission that is individual-based without specific target areas. A 7 to 11 percent price differential is identified within 4000ft of the Fairmount tree plantings. We argue that this is largely driven by either social capital creation or a signaling mechanism, on the top of an intrinsic tree value (around 2 percent). Findings using the PHS tree program suggest that development of social capital or environmentally-conscious behavior might be a less important channel. Any positive changes brought by the PHS tree plantings were not detected with sufficient statistical power.

Using two decades of American Housing Survey data from 1985-2005, we estimate the impact on household mobility of owners having negative equity in their homes and of rising mortgage interest rates. We find that both lead to lower, not higher, mobility rates over time. The impacts are economically large, with mobility being almost 50 percent lower for owners with negative equity in their homes. This does not imply that current worries about defaults and owners having to move from their homes are entirely misplaced. It does indicate that, in the past, the lock-in effects of these two factors were dominant over time. Our results cannot simply be extrapolated to the future, but policy makers should begin to consider the consequences of lock-in and reduced household mobility because they are quite different from those associated with default and higher mobility.

When liquidity plays an important role as in times of financial crisis, asset prices in some markets may reflect the amount of liquidity available in the market rather than the future earning power of the asset. Mark-to-market accounting is not a desirable way to assess the solvency of a financial institution in such circumstances. We show that a shock in the insurance sector can cause the current value of banks’ assets to be less than the current value of their liabilities so the banks are insolvent. In contrast, if historic cost accounting is used, banks are allowed to continue and can meet all their future liabilities. Mark-to-market accounting can thus lead to contagion where none would occur with historic cost accounting.

Like many other assets, housing prices are quite volatile relative to observable changes in fundamentals. If we are going to understand boom-bust housing cycles, we must incorporate housing supply. In this paper, we present a simple model of housing bubbles which predicts that places with more elastic housing supply have fewer and shorter bubbles, with smaller price increases. However, the welfare consequences of bubbles may actually be higher in more elastic places because those places will overbuild more in response to a bubble. The data show that the price run-ups of the 1980s were almost exclusively experienced in cities where housing supply is more inelastic. More elastic places had slightly larger increases in building during that period. Over the past five years, a modest number of more elastic places also experienced large price booms, but as the model suggests, these booms seem to have been quite short. Prices are already moving back towards construction costs in those areas.

Aggregate stock prices, relative to virtually any indicator of fundamental value, soared to unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Even today, after the market declines since 2000, they remain well above historical norms. Why? We consider one particular explanation: a fall in macroeconomic risk, or the volatility of the aggregate economy. Empirically, we find a strong correlation between low frequency movements in macroeconomic volatility and low frequency movements in the stock market. To model this phenomenon, we estimate a two-state regime switching model for the volatility and mean of consumption growth, and find evidence of a shift to substantially lower consumption volatility at the beginning of the 1990s. We then use these estimates from post-war data to calibrate a rational asset pricing model with regime switches in both the mean and standard deviation of consumption growth. Plausible parameterizations of the model are found to account for a significant portion of the run-up in asset valuation ratios observed in the late 1990s.

This paper develops a new model of transaction costs, arising as the rents that a monopolistic market maker is able to extract from impatient investors. The mechanism for trade is a limit order, and immediacy is supplied when the limit order is executed. We show that limit orders are American options and their value represents the cost of transacting. The limit prices inducing immediate execution of the order are functionally equivalent to bid and ask prices, and can be solved for various transaction sizes to characterize the market maker's entire supply curve. We find considerable empirical support for the model's predictions in the cross-section of NYSE firms. The model produces unbiased, out-of-sample forecasts of abnormal returns for firms being added to the S&P 500 index.

Banks perform various roles in the economy. First, they ameliorate the information problems between investors and borrowers by monitoring the latter and ensuring a proper use of the depositors’ funds. Second, they provide intertemporal smoothing of risk that cannot be diversified at a given point in time as well as insurance to depositors against unexpected consumption shocks. Because of the maturity mismatch between their assets and liabilities, however, banks are subject to the possibility of runs and systemic risk. Third, banks contribute to the growth of the economy. Fourth, they perform an important role in corporate governance. The relative importance of the different roles of banks varies substantially across countries and times but, banks are always critical to the financial system.

We show how a high degree of commonality in investor liquidity shocks can diminish incentives for intermediaries to keep markets open and lead to market collapse, even without information asymmetry or news affecting fundamentals. We motivate our model using the perpetual floating-rate note market where two years of explosive growth – in which issues by high quality borrowers were placed with institutional investors and traded in a liquid secondary market – were followed by a precipitous collapse when market intermediaries withdrew due to large order imbalances. We shed new light on the trade-off between ownership concentration and market liquidity.

We analyze tender offers where privately informed shareholders are uncertain about the raider's ability to improve firm value. The raider suffers a "lemons problem" in that, for any price offered, only shareholders who are relatively pessimistic about the value of the firm tender their shares. Consequently, the raider finds it too costly to induce shareholders to tender when their information is positive. In the limit as the number of shareholders gets arbitrarily large, when private benefits are relatively low, the tender offer is unsuccessful if the takeover has the potential to create value. The takeover market is therefore inefficient. In contrast, when private benefits of control are high, the tender offer allocates the firm to any value-increasing raider, but may also allow inefficient takeovers to occur. Unlike the case where all information is symmetric, shareholders cannot always extract the entire surplus from the acquisition.

In this paper we examine and compare the legal and institutional set-ups in China and India. China differs from most of the countries studied in the law, institutions, finance, and growth literature: Its legal and financial systems as well as institutions are all underdeveloped, but its economy has been growing at a very fast rate. Despite its English common-law origin and British-style judicial system and democratic government, there is enough documented evidence to suggest that the effective level of investor protection and the quality of legal institutions in India are quite weak as well. However, this has evidently not prohibited growth in either country. Small and high growth firms in both countries make extensive use of informal and relationship-based arrangements to finance growth.

A number of studies have pointed to various mistakes that consumers might make in their consumption-saving and financial decisions. We utilize a unique market experiment conducted by a large U.S. bank to assess how systematic and costly such mistakes are in practice. The bank offered consumers a choice between two credit card contracts, one with an annual fee but a lower interest rate and one with no annual fee but a higher interest rate. To minimize their total interest costs net of the fee, consumers expecting to borrow a sufficiently large amount should choose the contract with the fee, and vice-versa.
We find that on average consumers chose the contract that ex post minimized their net costs. A substantial fraction of consumers (about 40%) still chose the ex post sub-optimal contract, with some incurring hundreds of dollars of avoidable interest costs. Nonetheless, the probability of choosing the sub-optimal contract declines with the dollar magnitude of the potential error, and consumers with larger errors were more likely to subsequently switch to the optimal contract. Thus most of the errors appear not to have been very costly, with the exception that a small minority of consumers persists in holding substantially sub-optimal contracts without switching.

Until recently, all Canadian mutual funds were required to disclose all their individual trades, offering a unique and ideal opportunity to measure and analyze the cost and performance of mutual funds’ trades. We find that active management delivers both cheaper trades and better subsequent performance, and that the dissipative effect of flow-driven transactions costs is primarily through forced sales. Fund size associates with both cheaper trades and better subsequent performance, and a series of trades predicts more price movement in the predicted direction, indicating the value to funds of keeping their trading anonymous.

The standard analysis of corporate governance assumes that shareholders vote in ratios that firms choose, such as one share-one vote. However, if the cost of unbundling and trading votes is sufficiently low, then shareholders choose the ratios. We document an active market for votes within the U.S. equity loan market, where the average vote sells for zero. We hypothesize that asymmetric information motivates the vote trade and find support in the cross section. More trading occurs for higher-spread and worse-performing firms, especially when voting is close. Vote trading corresponds to support for shareholder proposals and opposition to management proposals.

This article develops and estimates a dynamic arbitrage-free model of the current forward curve as the sum of (i) an unconditional component, (ii) a maturity-specific component and (iii) a date-specific component. The model combines features of the Preferred Habitat model, the Expectations Hypothesis (ET) and affine yield curve models; it permits a class of low-parameter, multiple state variable dynamic models for the forward curve. We show how to construct alternative parametric examples of the three components from a sum of exponential functions, verify that the resulting
forward curves satisfy the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) conditions, and derive the risk-neutral dynamics for the purpose of pricing interest rate derivatives. We select a model from alternative affine examples that are fitted to the Fama-Bliss Treasury data over an initial training period and use it to generate out-of-sample forecasts for forward rates and yields. For forecast horizons of 6 months or longer, the forecasts of this model significantly outperform those from common benchmark models.

This paper investigates the stock market reaction to sudden changes in investor mood. Motivated by psychological evidence of a strong link between soccer outcomes and mood, we use international soccer results as our primary mood variable. We find a significant market decline after soccer losses. For example, a loss in the World Cup elimination stage leads to a next-day abnormal stock return of ?49 basis points. This loss effect is stronger in small stocks and in more important games, and is robust to methodological changes. We also document a loss effect after international cricket, rugby, and basketball games.

In this article the authors address the problems regarding consumption and portfolios faced by inattentive investors in relation to transaction costs. The authors sough to expand this economic model to address significant events that will gain the attention of consumers and allow for recalibration of investments on a case by case basis. The late and sporadic response to economic news by investors is discussed. The authors recommend that investors check their portfolios regularly and to operate a transaction account without risk in the intervening period.

A general equilibrium production economy with heterogeneous firms and irreversible investment generates the value premium. Investment irreversibility prevents unprofitable value firms from optimally scaling down their capital stock. In contrast, profitable and fast growing - growth - firms can optimally use investment to provide consumption insurance. Value firms are riskier and have higher expected returns than growth firms, especially in bad times when consumption volatility is high. The value premium is larger for small stocks as small value firms are more severely affected by irreversibility. Firms' investment and capital predict the cross-section of stock returns much like book-to-market and market equity both in the model and data. The model can replicate the failure of the unconditional CAPM. Multifactor models, including the Fama and French (1993) factor model, and to a lesser extent, conditional versions of the CAPM, outperform the unconditional CAPM.

We offer evidence that interest rate spreads on syndicated loans to corporate borrowers are economically significantly smaller in Europe than in the United States, other things equal. Differences in borrower, loan, and lender characteristics do not appear to explain this phenomenon. Borrowers overwhelmingly issue in their natural home market and bank portfolios display home bias. This may explain why pricing discrepancies are not competed away, though their causes remain a puzzle. Thus, important determinants of loan origination market outcomes remain to be identified, home bias appears to be material for pricing, and corporate financing costs differ across Europe and the United States.

Many authors have argued that proper modeling of the strategic interaction between players requires a game theoretic approach as opposed to a decision theoretic approach. We argue in this paper, however, that there are many environments in which decision analysis can deal with strategic interactions just as well and we present equivalence results for such environments. These equivalence results allow the prescriptive decision analyst to use the standard tools that a sound decision analysis requires, including decision trees and sensitivity analysis, even when confronted with strategic settings.

We propose a dynamic risk-based model that captures the value premium. Firms are modeled as long-lived assets distinguished by the timing of cash flows. The stochastic discount factor is specified so that shocks to aggregate dividends are priced, but shocks to the discount rate are not. The model implies that growth firms covary more with the discount rate than do value firms, which covary more with cash flows. When calibrated to explain aggregate stock market behavior, the model accounts for the observed value premium, the high Sharpe ratios on value firms, and the poor performance of the CAPM. Copyright 2007 by The American Finance Association.

We study structural models of stochastic discount factors and explore alternative methods of estimating such models using data on macroeconomic risk and asset returns. Particular attention is devoted to recursive utility models in which risk aversion can be modified without altering intertemporal substitution. We characterize the impact of changing the intertemporal substitution and risk aversion parameters on equilibrium short-run and long-run risk prices and on equilibrium wealth.

What is the effect of non-tradeable idiosyncratic risk on asset-market risk premiums? Constantinides and Duffie (1996) and Mankiw (1986) have shown that risk premiums will increase if the idiosyncratic shocks become more volatile during economic contractions. We add two important ingredients to this relationship: (i) the life cycle, and (ii) capital accumulation. We show that in a realistically calibrated life-cycle economy with production these ingredients mitigate the ability of idiosyncratic risk to account for the observed Sharpe ratio on U.S. equity. While the Constantinides-Duffie model can account for the U.S. value of 41% with a risk-aversion coefficient of 8, our model generates a Sharpe ratio of 33%, which is roughly half-way to the complete-markets value of 25%. Almost all of this reduction is due to capital accumulation. Life-cycle effects are important in our model — we demonstrate that idiosyncratic risk matters for asset pricing because it inhibits the intergenerational sharing of aggregate risk — but their
net effect on the Sharpe ratio is small.

In their seminal paper, Mehra and Prescott (1985), Rajnish Mehra and Edward Prescott were the first among many subsequent authors to suggest that non-traded labor-market risk may provide a resolution to the equity-premium puzzle. The most direct demonstration of this was Constantinides and Duffie (1996), who showed that, under certain conditions, cross-sectionally uncorrelated unit-root shocks which become more volatile during economic contractions can resolve the puzzle. We examine the robustness of this to life-cycle effects. Retired people, for instance, do not face labor-market risk. If we incorporate them, to what extent will the equity premium be resurrected? Our answer is “not very much." Our model, with realistic life cycle features, can still account for about 75% of the average equity premium and the Sharpe ratio observed on the U.S. stock market.

We present novel empirical evidence that conflicts of interest between creditors and their borrowers have a significant impact on firm investment policy. We examine a large sample of private credit agreements between banks and public firms and find that 32% of the agreements contain an explicit restriction on the firm’s capital expenditures. Creditors are more likely to impose a capital expenditure restriction as a borrower’s credit quality deteriorates, and the use of a restriction appears at least as sensitive to borrower credit quality as other contractual terms, such as interest rates, collateral requirements, or the use of financial covenants. We find that capital expenditure restrictions cause a reduction in firm investment and that firms obtaining contracts with a new restriction experience subsequent increases in their market value and operating performance.

We use a production-based asset pricing model to investigate whether financing constraints are quantitatively important for the cross-section of returns. Specifically, we use GMM to explore the stochastic Euler equation imposed on returns by optimal investment. Our methods can identify the impact of financial frictions on the stochastic discount factor with cyclical variations in cost of external funds. We find that financing frictions provide a common factor that improves the pricing of cross-sectional returns. Moreover, the shadow cost of external funds exhibits strong procyclical variation, so that financial frictions are more important in relatively good economic conditions.

Using questions expressly added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we estimate the change in consumption expenditures caused by the 2001 federal income tax rebates and test the permanent income hypothesis. We exploit the unique, randomized timing of rebate receipt across households. Households spent 20 to 40 percent of their rebates on nondurable goods during the three-month period in which their rebates arrived, and roughly two-thirds of their rebates cumulatively during this period and the subsequent three-month period. The implied effects on aggregate consumption demand are substantial. Consistent with liquidity constraints, responses are larger for households with low liquid wealth or low income.

In this paper, we develop a specific observable symptom of a banking system that underprices the default spread in non-recourse asset-backed lending. Using three different data sets for 18 countries and property types, we find that, following a negative demand shock, the "underpricing" economies experience far deeper asset market crashes than economies in which the put option is correctly priced. Furthermore, only one of the countries in our sample continues to exhibit the underpricing symptom following a market crash. This indicates that market crashes have a cleansing effect and eliminate underpricing at least for a period of time. This makes investing in such markets safer following a negative demand shock.

The observed predictability in indexes and domestic mutual funds has been attributed to stale prices. Market timing of mutual funds exploits this predictability. We show that there are few stale prices for stocks in the top few deciles of market value and that mutual funds
concentrate their holding in these deciles. Still, we observe predictability in the returns of portfolios and mutual funds holding these stocks. Much of this predictability is due to stickiness, or momentum, in market returns and not stale prices. Thus, the often suggested use of “fairvalue” accounting will not eliminate the profitability of market timing.

This paper proposes a consumption-based model that can account for many features of the nominal term structure of interest rates. The driving force behind the model is a time-varying price of risk generated by external habit. Nominal bonds depend on past consumption growth through habit and on expected inflation. When calibrated data on consumption, inflation, and the average level of bond yields, the model produces realistic volatility of bond yields and can explain key aspects of the expectations puzzle documented by Campbell and Shiller (1991) and Fama and Bliss (1987). When Actual consumption and inflation data are fed into the model, the model is shown to account for many of the short and long-run fluctuations in the short-term interest rate and the yield spread. At the same time, the model captures the high equity premium and excess stock market volatility.

This paper takes a portfolio view of consumer credit. Default models (credit-risk scores) estimate the probability of default of individual loans. But to compute risk-adjusted returns, lenders also need to know the covariances of the returns on their loans with aggregate returns. Covariances are independently relevant for lenders who care directly about the volatility of their portfolios, e.g. because of Value-at-Risk considerations or the structure of the securitization market. Cross-sectional differences in these covariances also provide insight into the nature of the shocks hitting different types of consumers. We use a unique panel dataset of credit bureau records to measure the ‘covariance risk’ of individual consumers, i.e., the covariance of their default risk with aggregate consumer default rates, and more generally to analyze the cross-sectional distribution of credit, including the effects of credit scores. We obtain two key sets of results. First, there is significant systematic heterogeneity in covariance risk across consumers with different characteristics. Consumers with high covariance risk tend to also have low credit scores (high default probabilities). Second, the amount of credit obtained by consumers significantly increases with their credit scores, and significantly decreases with their covariance risk (especially revolving credit), though the effect of covariance risk is smaller in magnitude. It appears that some lenders take covariance risk into account, at least in part, in determining the amount of credit they provide.

This paper analyzes securitization and more generally special purpose vehicles (SPVs), which are now pervasive in corporate finance. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the institutional features of SPVs and securitization. The second part provides a model to analyze the motivations for using SPVs, and the conditions under which SPVs are sustainable. We argue that a key source of value to using SPVs is that they help reduce bankruptcy costs. Off-balance sheet financing involves transferring assets to SPVs, which reduces the amount of assets that are subject to bankruptcy costs, since SPVs are carefully designed to avoid bankruptcy. Off-balance sheet financing is most advantageous for sponsoring firms that are risky or face large bankruptcy costs. SPVs become sustainable in a repeated SPV game, because firms can implicitly commit to subsidize or bail out their SPVs when the SPV would otherwise not honor its debt commitments, despite legal and accounting restrictions to the contrary.
The third part of the paper tests two key implications of the model using unique data on credit card securitizations. First, riskier firms should securitize more, ceteris paribus. Second, since investors know that SPV sponsors can bail out their SPVs if there is a need, in pricing the debt of the SPV investors will care about the risk of the sponsor defaulting, above and beyond the risk of the SPVs assets. We find evidence consistent with these implications.

The stabilization of economic activity in the mid 1980s has received considerable attention. Research has focused primarily on the role played by milder economic shocks, improved inventory management, and better monetary policy. This paper explores another potential explanation: financial innovation. Examples of such innovation include developments in lending practices and loan markets that have enhanced the ability of households and firms to borrow and changes in government policy such as the demise of Regulation Q. We employ a variety of simple empirical techniques to identify links between the observed moderation in economic activity and the influence of financial innovation on consumer spending, housing investment, and business fixed investment. Our results suggest that financial innovation should be added to the list of likely contributors to the mid-1980s stabilization.

We study an automobile insurance market where the quantity of insurance purchased has a large impact on the resulting frequency and severity of claims. Policyholders who purchase insurance against increases in future premiums because of at-fault claims experience a roughly 40 percent increase in reported claims. Although consistent with differences in accident rates due to adverse selection or exante moral hazard, the evidence suggests that changes in claim reporting behavior can account for nearly all of the increase in claims. After controlling for differences in observable characteristics, we show that the increase in claim frequency is concentrated in relatively small claims and claims where the policyholder is at-fault, suggesting that consumers without premium protection strategically choose not to report such claims to the insurance company. The frequency of large claims and claims where the policyholder is not at fault are nearly identical across the two groups. Using this reduced form evidence to reject the endogeneity of premium protection with underlying accident rates, we estimate a structural model with latent accidents and claim reporting thresholds to explain the observed pattern of claim frequencies and severities. The estimated differences in underlying accident rates are quite small and suggest at most a minor role for adverse selection or ex-ante moral hazard. However, the estimated differences in reporting thresholds, identified by differences in the shapes of the claim severity distributions, are large and lead to significant differences in reported claims. This result highlights a novel source of information asymmetries in automobile insurance and illustrates the importance of accounting for differences in claim reporting behavior when studying insurance markets.

Habit utility has been the focus of a large and growing body of literature in financial economics. This study investigates ways of accurately and efficiently solving the Campbell and Cochrane (1999) external habit model. Solutions for this model based on a grid of values for the state variable are shown to converge as the grid becomes increasingly fine. Convergence is substantially faster if the price-dividend ratio is computed as a series of "zero-coupon equity" claims rather than as the fixed-point of the Euler equation. Fitting the model to the term structure as well as to equity moments (as in Wachter (2005)) also results in faster convergence.

We construct optimal portfolios of mutual funds whose objectives include socially responsible investment (SRI). Comparing portfolios of these funds to those constructed from the broader fund universe reveals the cost of imposing the SRI constraint on investors seeking the highest Sharpe ratio. This SRI cost depends crucially on the investor's views about asset pricing models and stock-picking skill by fund managers. To an investor who believes strongly in the CAPM and rules out managerial skill, i.e. a market-index investor, the cost of the SRI constraint is typically just a few basis points per month, measured in certainly-equivalent loss. To an investor who still disallows skill but instead believes to some degree in pricing models that associate higher returns with exposures to size, value, and momentum factors, the SRI constraint is much costlier, typically by at least 30 basis points per month. The SRI constraint imposes large costs on investors whose beliefs allow a substantial amount of fund-manager skill, i.e., investors who rely heavily on individual funds' track records to predict future performance.

We consider how fund managers respond to the conflicting preferences of their investors. We focus on the conflict between the taxable and retirement accounts of international funds, which face different tradeoffs between dividends and capital gains. In principle, managers could resolve this conflict through dividend arbitrage, but a proprietary database of dividend-arbitrage transactions shows that in practice they cannot. Thus, managers must resolve it through their investment policies. We find robust evidence that managers with more retirement money favor the preferences of retirement investors and further evidence for this view in the difference between U.S. and Canadian funds’ portfolio weights.

Because a money manager learns more about her skill from her management experience than outsiders can learn from her realized returns, she expects inefficiency in future contracts that condition exclusively on realized returns. A fund family that learns what the manager learns can reduce this inefficiency cost if the family is large enough. The family's incentive is to retain any given manager regardless of her skill but, when the family has enough managers, it adds value by boosting the credibility of its retentions through the firing of others. As the number of managers grows, the efficiency loss goes to zero.

The conventional wisdom that homeownership is very risky ignores the fact that the alternative, renting, is also risky. Owning a house provides a hedge against fluctuations in housing costs, but in turn introduces asset price risk. In a simple model of tenure choice with endogenous house prices, we show that the net risk of owning declines with a household's expected horizon in its house and with the correlation in housing costs in future locations. Empirically, we find that both house prices, relative to rents, and the probability of homeownership increase with net rent risk.

Urban decline is not the mirror image of growth, and durable housing is the primary reason the nature of decline is so different. This paper presents a model of urban decline with durable housing and verifies these implications of the model: (1) city growth rates are skewed so that cities grow more quickly than they decline; (2) urban decline is highly persistent; (3) positive shocks increase population more than they increase housing prices; (4) negative shocks decrease housing prices more than they decrease population; (5) if housing prices are below construction costs, then the city declines; and (6) the combination of cheap housing and weak labor demand attracts individuals with low levels of human capital to declining cities.

We solve the portfolio problem of a long-run investor when the term structure is Gaussian and when the investor has access to nominal bonds and stock. We apply our method to a three-factor model that captures the failure of the expectations hypothesis. We extend this model to account for time-varying expected inflation, and estimate the model with both inflation and term structure data. The estimates imply that the bond portfolio of a long-run investor looks very different from the portfolio of a mean-variance optimizer. In particular, time-varying term premia generate large hedging demands for long-term bonds.

I examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer's utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others (the benchmark level of consumption) as well as on the level of the consumer's own consumption. The socially optimal balanced growth path is characterized by the Modified Golden Rule and by a condition on the intergenerational allocation of consumption in each period. A competitive economy can be induced to attain the social optimum by a lump-sum pay-as-you-go social security system and a tax on capital income.

In this article the author provides an extensive analysis of the various aspects of the Basel II Accord. Notwithstanding the gains from adoption of Basel II, he argues that these gains are unlikely to outweigh the costs of implementation and compliance: Basel II will be very costly for banks, home and host country supervisors, and, to the extent that it exacerbates macroeconomic cycles, to the broader economy as well.

The costs of implementing investment strategies represent a significant drag on the performance of mutual funds and other institutional investors. It is the responsibility of institutional investors, and in the interests of the individual investors they represent, to seek market mechanisms that mitigate trading costs. We investigate an example of one such liquidity provision mechanism whereby liquidity demanders auction a set of trades as a package directly to potential liquidity providers. A critical feature of the auction is that the identities of the securities in the package are not revealed to the bidder. We demonstrate that this mechanism provides a transactions cost savings relative to more traditional trading mechanisms for the liquidity demander as well as an efficient way for liquidity suppliers to obtain order flow. We argue that the cost savings afforded this new mechanism are due to the potential for low cost crosses with the bidder's existing inventory positions and through the longer trading horizon, and superior trading ability, of the bidders. This research suggests that the ability to innovate via new liquidity provision mechanisms can provide market participants with transaction cost savings that cannot be easily duplicated on more traditional exchanges.

When demands for heterogeneous goods in a concentrated market shift over time due to network or contagion effects, forward-looking firms consider the strategic impact of investment, pricing, and other conduct. Network effects may be a substantial barrier to entry, giving both entrants and incumbents powerful strategic incentives to “tip” the market. A Markov perfect equilibrium model captures this strategic behavior, and permits the comparison of “as is” market trajectories with “but for” trajectories under counterfactuals where “bad acts” by some firms are eliminated. Our analysis is applied to a stylized description of the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft. Appendices give conditions for econometric identification and estimation of a Markov perfect equilibrium model from observations on partial trajectories, and discuss estimation of the impacts of firm conduct on consumers and rival firms.

Federal law mandates the removal of personal bankruptcies from credit reports after 10 years. The removal's effect is market efficiency in reverse. The short-term effect is a spurious boost in apparent creditworthiness, especially for the more creditworthy bankrupts, delivering a substantial increase in both credit scores and the number and aggregate limit of bank cards. The longer-term effect is lower scores and higher delinquency than initial full-information scores predict. These findings relate to both the debate over the bankruptcy code and the wisdom of influencing market clearing by removing information.

We provide new evidence on the asset price incidence of corporate-level investment subsidies by examining the relative stock price performance of publicly traded companies in the real estate industry that should have been differentially affected by the capital gains tax rate reduction enacted in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. By comparing real estate firms that have an organizational structure that allows entities who sell property to t to defer capitals gains taxes and that plan to use the structure to acquire property with those that do not, we isolate the effect of the tax cut from industry trends and firm-level heterogeneity. When we examine the time period surrounding the reductions in the capital gains tax rate, our results suggests the tax seller’s capital gains tax deferral accrued monthly to be the buyer of an appreciated property.

Using tract-level data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses, we estimate how the income tax-related benefits to owner-occupiers are distributed spatially across the United States. Even though the top marginal tax rate has fallen substantially since 1979 and the tax code more generally has become less progressive, the tax subsidy per household or owner was virtually unchanged between 1979-1989, and then rose substantially between 1989-1999.
Geographically, gross program benefits have been and remain very spatially targeted. At the state level, California’s owners have received a disproportionate share of the subsidy flows over the past two decades. Their share of the gross benefits nationally has fluctuated from 19 to 22 percent. Depending upon the year, this is from 1.8 to 2.3 times their share of the nation’s owners. For the median state, the ratio of its share of tax benefits to its share of owners has declined over time, from 0.83 in 1979 to 0.76 in 1999.
Examining the data at the metropolitan area level finds an even more dramatic spatial targeting, and a spatial skewness that is increasing over time. Comparing benefit flows in 1979 in the top 20 areas versus those in the bottom 20 areas finds that owners in the highest subsidy areas received from 2.7 to 8.0 times the subsidy reaped by owners in the bottom group. By 1999, the analogous calculation finds owners in the top 20 areas receiving from 3.4 to 17.1 times more benefits than owners in any of the 20 lowest recipient areas. Despite the increasing skewness, the top subsidy recipient areas tend to persist over time. In particular, the very high benefit per owner areas are heavily concentrated in California and the New York City to Boston corridor. While taxes are somewhat higher in these places, it is high and rising house prices which appear most responsible for the large and increasing skewness in the spatial distribution of benefits.

In this paper we show that the main empirical findings about firm diversification and performance are consistent with the maximization of shareholder value. In our model, diversification allows a firm to explore better productive opportunities while taking advantage of synergies. By explicitly linking the diversification strategies of the firm to differences in size and productivity, our model provides a natural laboratory to investigate several aspects of the relationship between diversification and performance. Specifically, we show that our model can rationalize the evidence on the diversification discount (Lang and Stulz (1994)) and the documented relation between diversification and productivity (Schoar (2002)).

This paper asks whether the asset pricing fluctuations induced by the presence of costly external finance are empirically plausible. To accomplish this, we incorporate costly external finance into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model and explore its implications for the properties of the returns on key financial assets, such as stocks, bonds and risky loans. We find that the mean and volatility of the equity premium, although small, are significantly higher than those in comparable adjustment cost models. However, we also show that these results require a procyclical financing premium, a property that seems at odds with the data.

We analyze a dynamic market order model similar to Kyle (Econometrica 53 (1985) 1315). We show that when the market faces uncertainty about the existence of the insider in the market, the equilibrium outcome changes in a significant way. In particular, the insider manipulates (i.e., trades in the wrong direction and undertakes short term losses) in every equilibrium, given a long enough horizon, and independently of the precise nature of noise trading in the market.

In asymmetric information models of financial markets, prices imperfectly reveal the private information held by traders. Informed insiders thus have an incentive not only to trade less aggressively but also to manipulate the market by trading in the wrong direction and undertaking short-term losses, thereby increasing the noise in the trading process. In this paper we show that when the market faces uncertainty about the existence of the insider in the market and when there is a large number of trading periods before all private information is revealed, long-lived informed traders will manipulate in every equilibrium.

We estimate how tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing are distributed spatially across the United States and find striking skewness. At the state level, the mean tax benefit per owned unit in 1990 ranged from$917 in South Dakota to $10,718 in Hawaii. The dispersion is slightly greater when benefit flows are measured at the metropolitan area level. Even assuming the subsidies are funded in an income progressivity-neutral manner, a relatively few metro areas, primarily in California and the New York-Boston corridor, are shown to gain considerably while the vast majority of areas have relatively small gains or losses.

Ball Robin and Wu (2003) investigate the relationship between accounting standards and the structure of other institutions on the attributes of the financial reporting system. They find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that beyond accounting standards, the structure of other institutions, such as incentives of preparers and auditors, enforcement mechanisms and ownership structure affects the outcome of the financial reporting system. However, interpretation of the evidence with respect to the notion of quality of the financial reporting system and the quality of accounting standards that the authors introduce is problematic.

The literature documents a convex relation between past returns and fund flows of mutual funds. We show this to be consistent with fund incentives, because funds discard exactly those strategies which underperform. Past returns tell less about the future performance of funds which discard, so flows are less sensitive to them when they are poor. Our model predicts that strategy changes only occur after bad performance, and that bad performers who change strategy have dollar flow and future performance that are less sensitive to current performance than those that do not. Empirical tests support both predictions.

Complete financial markets transform the political choice between candidates with different redistribution policies. If redistribution policies do not affect aggregate wealth, then financial trade implies that wealth considerations have no effect on voting and so do not affect who wins. However, an election in which one candidate would redistribute results in redistribution, and redistribution is the same whether or not he wins. Furthermore, he proposes, and if elected carries out, more redistribution than he prefers. If redistribution policies do affect aggregate wealth, then everybody expects more wealth if the candidate with the higher aggregate?wealth policy wins.

As risk aversion approaches infinity, the portfolio of an investor with utility over consumption at time T is shown to converge to the portfolio consisting entirely of a bond maturing at time T. Previous work on bond allocation requires a specific model for equities, the term structure, and the investor's utility function. In contrast, the only substantive assumption required for the analysis in this paper is that markets are complete. The result, which holds regardless of the underlying investment opportunities and the utility function, formalizes the “preferred habitat” intuition of Modigliani and Sutch (Amer. Econom. Rev. 56 (1966) 178).

There is a large and growing literature documenting the relation between ex ante observable variables and stock returns. Importantly, much of the evidence on the relation between returns and observable variables like market capitalization, the ratio of price/book, and prior price change has been portrayed in the context of returns to simulated portfolio strategies. Often missing in these analyses is the distinction between realizable returns (i.e., the returns portfolio managers can realistically achieve in practice) and returns to simulated strategies. There is ample evidence that size and value strategies can be successfully implemented in practice; that is not the case for
momentum strategies. This paper documents the costs of implementing actual momentum strategies. I examine the trade behavior, and the costs of those trades, for three distinct investor styles (momentum, fundamental/value, and diversified/index) for 33 institutional investment managers executing trades in the U.S. and 36 other equity markets worldwide in both developed and emerging economies. The results show: (1) that momentum traders do indeed condition their trades on prior price movements; and (2) that costs for trades that are made conditional on prior market returns are significantly greater than for unconditional costs, especially for momentum traders. The evidence that we report on the actual costs of momentum-based trades indicates that the returns reported in previous studies of simulated momentum strategies are not sufficient to cover the costs of implementing those strategies.

This study investigates whether marketwide liquidity is a state variable important for asset pricing. We find that expected stock returns are related cross?sectionally to the sensitivities of returns to fluctuations in aggregate liquidity. Our monthly liquidity measure, an average of individual?stock measures estimated with daily data, relies on the principle that order flow induces greater return reversals when liquidity is lower. From 1966 through 1999, the average return on stocks with high sensitivities to liquidity exceeds that for stocks with low sensitivities by 7.5 percent annually, adjusted for exposures to the market return as well as size, value, and momentum factors. Furthermore, a liquidity risk factor accounts for half of the profits to a momentum strategy over the same 34?year period.

Andrew B Abel, "Comment on Michael Hurd: "Bequests: By Accident or by Design?"". In Death and Dollars: The Role of Gifts and Bequests in America, edited by Alicia H. Munnell, Annika Sunden, (2003), 118 - 126.

Andrew B Abel, "Comment on Michael Hurd: "Bequests: By Accident or by Design?"". In Death and Dollars: The Role of Gifts and Bequests in America, edited by Alicia H. Munnell, Annika Sunden, (2003), 118 - 126.

Is the stock market boom a result of the baby boom? This paper develops an overlapping generations model in which a baby boom is modeled as a high realization of a random birth rate, and the price of capital is determined endogenously by a convex cost of adjustment. A baby boom increases national saving and investment and thus causes an increase in the price of capital. The price of capital is mean-reverting so the initial increase in the price of capital is followed by a decrease. Social Security can potentially affect national saving and investment, though in the long run, it does not affect the price of capital.

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium production economy to explicitly link expected stock returns to firm characteristics such as firm size and the book-to-market ratio. Stock returns in the model are completely characterized by a conditional CAPM. Size and book-to-market are correlated with the true conditional market beta and therefore appear to predict stock returns. The cross-sectional relations between firm characteristics and returns can subsist even after one controls for typical empirical estimates of beta. These findings suggest that the empirical success of size and book-to-market can be consistent with a single-factor conditional CAPM model.

One reason why funds charge different prices to their investors is that they face different demand curves. One source of differentiation is asset retention: Performance-sensitive investors migrate from worse to better prospects, taking their performance sensitivity with them. In the cross-section we show that past attrition significantly influences the current pricing of retail but not institutional funds. In time-series we show that the repricing of retail funds after merging in new shareholders is predicted by the estimated effect on its demand curve. This result is robust to other influences on repricing, including asset and account-size changes.

This article provides a comprehensive study of survivorship issues using the mutual fund data of Carhart (1997). We demonstrate theoretically that when survival depends on multiperiod performance, the survivorship bias in average performance typically increases with the sample length. This is empirically relevant because evidence suggests a multiyear survival rule for U.S. mutual funds. In the data we find the annual bias increases from 0.07% for 1-year samples to 1% for samples longer than 15 years. We find that survivor conditioning weakens evidence of performance persistence. Finally, we explain how survivor conditioning affects the relation between performance and fund characteristics.

With a year of equity loans by a major lender, we measure the effect of actual short-selling costs and constraints on trading strategies that involve short-selling. We find the loans of initial public offering (IPOs), DotCom, large-cap, growth and low-momentum stocks to be cheap relative to the strategies’ documented profits and that investors who can short only stocks that are cheap and easy to borrow can enjoy at least some of the profits of unconstrained investors. Most IPOs are loaned on their first settlement days and throughout their first months, and the underperformance around lockup expiration is significant even for the IPOs that are cheap and easy to borrow. The effect of short-selling frictions appears strongest in merger arbitrage. Acquirers’ stock is expensive to borrow, especially when the acquirer is small, though the major influence on trading profits is not through expense but availability.

We present evidence that the equity premium and the premium of value stocks over growth stocks are consistent in the 1982–96 period with a stochastic discount factor calculated as the weighted average of individual households' marginal rate of substitution with low and economically plausible values of the relative risk aversion coefficient. Since these premia are not explained with an SDF calculated as the per capita marginal rate of substitution with a low value of the RRA coefficient, the evidence supports the hypothesis of incomplete consumption insurance. We also present evidence that an SDF calculated as the per capita marginal rate of substitution is better able to explain the equity premium and does so with a lower value of the RRA coefficient, as the definition of asset holders is tightened to recognize the limited participation of households in the capital market.

The subjective distribution of growth rates of aggregate consumption is characterized by pessimism if it is first-order stochastically dominated by the objective distribution. Uniform pessimism is a leftward translation of the objective distribution of the logarithm of the growth rate. The subjective distribution is characterized by doubt if it is mean-preserving spread of the objective distribution. Pessimism and doubt both reduce the riskfree rate and thus can help resolve the riskfree rate puzzle. Uniform pessimism and doubt both increase the average equity premium and thus can help resolve the equity premium puzzle.

We present evidence that fund managers inflate quarter-end portfolio prices with last-minute purchases of stocks already held. The magnitude of price inflation ranges from 0.5 percent per year for large-cap funds to well over 2 percent for small-cap funds. We find that the cross section of inflation matches the cross section of incentives from the flow/performance relation, that a surge of trading in the quarter's last minutes coincides with a surge in equity prices, and that the inflation is greatest for the stocks held by funds with the most incentive to inflate, controlling for the stocks' size and performance.

This article uses a new dataset of credit card accounts to analyze credit card delinquency, personal bankruptcy, and the stability of credit risk models. We estimate duration models for default and assess the relative importance of different variables in predicting default. We investigate how the propensity to default has changed over time, disentangling the two leading explanations for the recent increase in default rates—a deterioration in the risk composition of borrowers versus an increase in borrowers' willingness to default due to declines in default costs. Even after controlling for risk composition and economic fundamentals, the propensity to default significantly increased between 1995 and 1997. Standard default models missed an important time?varying default factor, consistent with a decline in default costs.

Capitalization levels in the property-liability insurance industry have increased dramatically in recent years-the capital-to-assets ratio rose from 25% in 1989 to 35% by 1999. This paper investigates the use of capital by insurers to provide evidence on whether the capital increase represents a legitimate response to changing market conditions or a true inefficiency that leads to performance penalties for insurers. We estimate “best practice” technical, cost, and revenue frontiers for a sample of insurers over the period 1993-1998, using data envelopment analysis, a non-parametric technique. The results indicate that most insurers significantly over-utilized equity capital during the sample period. Regression analysis provides evidence that capital over-utilization primarily represents an inefficiency for which insurers incur significant revenue penalties.

We construct optimal portfolios of equity funds by combining historical returns on funds and passive indexes with prior views about asset pricing and skill. By including both benchmark and nonbenchmark indexes, we distinguish pricing-model inaccuracy from managerial skill. Modest confidence in a pricing model helps construct portfolios with high Sharpe ratios. Investing in active mutual funds can be optimal even for investors who believe managers cannot outperform passive indexes. Optimal portfolios exclude hot-hand funds even for investors who believe momentum is priced. Our large universe of funds offers no close substitutes for the Fama-French and momentum benchmarks.

Estimates of standard performance measures can be improved by using returns on assets not used to define those measures. Alpha, the intercept in a regression of a fund's return on passive benchmark returns, can be estimated more precisely by using information in returns on nonbenchmark passive assets, whether or not one believes those assets are priced by the benchmarks. A fund's Sharpe ratio can be estimated more precisely by using returns on other assets as well as the fund. New estimates of these performance measures for a large universe of equity mutual funds exhibit substantial differences from the usual estimates.

This paper solves, in closed form, the optimal portfolio choice problem for an investor with utility over consumption under mean-reverting returns. Previous solutions either require approximations, numerical methods, or the assumption that the investor does not consume over his lifetime. This paper breaks the impasse by assuming that markets are complete. The solution leads to a new understanding of hedging demand and of the behavior of the approximate log-linear solution. The portfolio allocation takes the form of a weighted average and is shown to be analogous to duration for coupon bonds. Through this analogy, the notion of investment horizon is extended to that of an investor who consumes at multiple points in time.

This paper utilizes a unique data set of credit card accounts to analyze how people respond to credit supply. Increases in credit limits generate an immediate and significant rise in debt, counter to the Permanent-Income Hypothesis. The “MPC out of liquidity” is largest for people starting near their limit, consistent with binding liquidity constraints. However, the MPC is significant even for people starting well below their limit, consistent with precautionary models. Nonetheless, there are other results that conventional models cannot easily explain, for example, why so many people are borrowing on their credit cards, and simultaneously holding low yielding assets. The long-run elasticity of debt to the interest rate is approximately ?1.3, less than half of which represents balance-shifting across cards.

This paper suggests that skill accumulation through past work experience, or "learning-by-doing" (LBD), can provide an important propagation mechanism in a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model, as the current labor supply affects future productivity. Our econometric analysis uses a Bayesian approach to combine micro-level panel data with aggregate time series. Formal model evaluation shows that the introduction of the LBD mechanism improves the model's ability to fit the dynamics of aggregate output and hours.

General equilibrium models that predict a reduction in asset prices when baby boomers retire typically assume that people consume all of their wealth before they die. However, many people hold substantial wealth when they die. I develop a rational expectations, general equilibrium model with a bequest motive. In this model, a baby boom increases stock prices, and stock prices are rationally anticipated to fall when the baby boomers retire, even though consumers continue to hold assets throughout retirement. The continued high demand for assets by retired baby boomers does not attenuate the fall in the price of capital.

We evaluate the literature that, for standard-setting purposes, assesses the usefulness of accounting numbers on their stock market value association. For several reasons we conclude the literature provides little insight for standard setting. First, the association criterion has no theory of accounting or standard setting supporting it. Standard setters' descriptions of their objectives and accounting practice are both inconsistent with the criterion. Important forces shaping accounting standards and practice are ignored. Second, many tests in the literature rely on valuation models that omit important factors and many studies do not provide links between valuation model inputs and accounting numbers. Finally, there are a variety of significant econometric issues in the studies.

A long return history is useful in estimating the current equity premium even if the historical distribution has experienced structural breaks. The long series helps not only if the timing of breaks is uncertain but also if one believes that large shifts in the premium are unlikely or that the premium is associated, in part, with volatility. Our framework incorporates these features along with a belief that prices are likely to move opposite to contemporaneous shifts in the premium. The estimated premium since 1834 fluctuates between 4 and 6 percent and exhibits its sharpest drop in the last decade.

The article presents commentary from Jessica A. Wachter about a paper written by Yacine Ait-Sahalia and Michael W. Brandt entitled (A&B) "Variable Selection for Portfolio Choice," which appeared in the August, 2001 issue of the "Journal of Finance." In that paper A&B employed conditional moments of return to select an optimal portfolio. The author of the current paper acknowledges the validity of their work for single-period investments, but raises questions about its suitability for investments that extend over multiple periods.

This paper provides an equilibrium numerical model of an open city economy with mobile firms and resident workers. Given household preferences and firm technologies and an exogenous configuration of city tax rates and national grants and fiscal mandates, the model calculates equilibrium values for aggregate city economic activity, factor prices, and finally, local tax bases, revenues, and public goods provision. The model is calibrated to the Philadelphia economy for Fiscal Year 1998. We then explore the economic and fiscal consequences of raising city tax rates and the city’s ability to finance rising local welfare payments. We find the city to be incapable of bearing significant increases in local responsibility for welfare transfers.

With fixed costs of participating in the stock market, consumers with high income will participate in the stock market, but consumers with lower income will not participate. If a fully-funded defined-contribution social security system tries to exploit the equity premium by selling a dollar of bonds per capita and buying a dollar of equity per capita, consumers who save but do not participate in the stock market will increase their consumption, thereby reducing saving and capital accumulation. Calibration of a general equilibrium model indicates that this policy could reduce the aggregate capital stock substantially, by about 50 cents per capita.

This paper analyzes mutual-fund performance from an investor's perspective. We study the portfolio-choice problem for a mean-variance investor choosing among a risk-free asset, index funds, and actively managed mutual funds. To solve this problem, we employ a Bayesian method of performance evaluation; a key innovation in our approach is the development of a flexible set of prior beliefs about managerial skill. We then apply our methodology to a sample of 1,437 mutual funds. We find that some extremely skeptical prior beliefs nevertheless lead to economically significant allocations to active managers.

We examine investment behavior when firms face costs in the access to external funds. We find that despite the existence of liquidity constraints, standard investment regressions predict that cash flow is an important determinant of investment only if one ignores q. Conversely, we also obtain significant cash flow effects even in the absence of financial frictions. These findings provide support to the argument that the success of cash-flow-augmented investment regressions is probably due to a combination of measurement error in q and identification problems.

A search-theoretic model of equilibrium unemployment is constructed and shown to be consistent with the key regularities of the labor market and business cycle. The two distinguishing features of the model are: (i) the decision to accept or reject jobs is modeled explicitly, and (ii) markets are incomplete. The model is well suited to address a number of interesting policy questions. Two such applications are provided: the impact of unemployment insurance, and the welfare costs of business cycles.

We examine whether a distinct equity issuer underperformance anomaly exists. In a sample of initial public offering (IPO) and seasoned equity offering (SEO) firms from 1975 to 1992, we find that underperformance is concentrated primarily in small issuing firms with low book-to-market ratios. SEO firms, that underperform these standard benchmarks have time series returns that covary with factor returns constructed from nonissuing firms. We conclude that the stock returns following equity issues reflect a more pervasive return pattern in the broader set of publicly traded companies.

We investigate the portfolio choices of mean-variance-optimizing investors who use sample evidence to update prior beliefs centered on either risk-based or characteristic-based pricing models. With dogmatic beliefs in such models and an unconstrained ratio of position size to capital, optimal portfolios can differ across models to economically significant degrees. The differences are substantially reduced by modest uncertainty about the models’ pricing abilities. When the ratio of position size to capital is subject to realistic constraints, the differences in portfolios across models become even less important and are nonexistent in some cases.

Exchange seat prices are widely reported and followed as measures of market sentiment. This paper analyzes the information content of NYSE seat prices using: (1) annual seat prices from 1869 to 1998, and (2) the complete record of trades, bids and offers for the seat market from 1973 to 1994. Seat market volumes have predictive power regarding future stock market returns, consistent with a model where seat market activity is a proxy for unobserved factors affecting expected returns. We find abnormally large price movements in seats prior to October 1987, consistent with the hypothesis that seat prices capture market sentiment.

Irreversibility and uncertainty increase the user cost of capital which tends to reduce the capital stock. Working in the opposite direction is a hangover effect, which arises because irreversibility prevents the firm from selling capital even when the marginal revenue product of capital is low. Neither the user cost effect nor the hangover effect dominates globally, so that irreversibility may increase or decrease capital accumulation. Furthermore, an increase in uncertainty can either increase or decrease the long-run capital stock under irreversibility relative to that under reversibility. Other effects that we consider, however, have unambiguous effects on long-run capital accumulation.

When a rate of return is regressed on a lagged stochastic regressor, such as a dividend yield, the regression disturbance is correlated with the regressor's innovation. The OLS estimator's finite-sample properties, derived here, can depart substantially from the standard regression setting. Bayesian posterior distributions for the regression parameters are obtained under specifications that differ with respect to (i) prior beliefs about the autocorrelation of the regressor and (ii) whether the initial observation of the regressor is specified as fixed or stochastic. The posteriors differ across such specifications, and asset allocations in the presence of estimation risk exhibit sensitivity to those differences.

A weekly database of retail money fund portfolio statistics is uneconomical for retail investors to observe, so it allows direct comparison of disclosed and undisclosed portfolios. This makes possible a more direct and unambiguous test for "window dressing" than elsewhere in the literature. The analysis shows that funds allocating between government and private issues hold more in government issues around disclosures than at other times, consistent with the theory that intermediaries prefer to disclose safer portfolios. Cross-sectional comparisons locate the most intense rebalancing in the worst recent performers.

We find that measures of board and ownership structure explain a significant amount of cross-sectional variation in CEO compensation, after controlling for standard economic determinants of pay. Moreover, the signs of the coefficients on the board and ownership structure variables suggest that CEOs earn greater compensation when governance structures are less effective. We also find that the predicted component of compensation arising from these characteristics of board and ownership structure has a statistically significant negative relation with subsequent firm operating and stock return performance. Overall, our results suggest that firms with weaker governance structures have greater agency problems; that CEOs at firms with greater agency problems receive greater compensation; and that firms with greater agency problems perform worse.

The provision of public services through national legislatures gives legislators the chance to fund locally beneficial public projects using a shared national tax base. Nationally financed and provided local (congestible) public goods will be purchased at a subsidized price below marginal cost and may be inefficiently too large as a consequence. An important assumption behind this inefficiency is that national legislators in fact demand more of the locally beneficial project as the local price for projects declines. This paper provides the first direct test of this important assumption using legislators' project choices following the passage of the Water Resources Development Act of 1986 (WRDA'86). We find legislators' chosen water project sizes do fall as the local cost share rises, with a price elasticity of demand ranging from ?0.81 for flood control and shoreline protection projects to ?2.55 for large navigation projects. The requirement of WRDA'86 that local taxpayers contribute a greater share to the funding of local water projects reduced overall proposed project spending in our sample by 35% and the federal outlay for proposed project spending by 48%.

Costs of equity for individual firms are estimated in a Bayesian framework using several factor-based pricing models. Substantial prior uncertainty about mispricing often produces an estimated cost of equity close to that obtained with mispricing precluded, even for a stock whose average return departs significantly from the pricing model's prediction. Uncertainty about which pricing model to use is less important, on average, than within-model parameter uncertainty. In the absence of mispricing uncertainty, uncertainty about factor premiums is generally the largest source of overall uncertainty about a firm’s cost of equity, although uncertainty about betas is nearly as important.

In 1982, Dimensional Fund Advisors launched a mutual fund intended to capture the returns of small-cap stocks. The 9-10 Fund is based on the CRSP 9-10 Index, an index of small-cap stocks constituting the ninth and tenth deciles of NYSE market capitalization, although the 9-10 Fund incorporates investment rules and a trading strategy that are aimed at minimizing the potentially excessive trade costs associated with such illiquid stocks. As a result, the 9-10 Fund provided a 2.2% annual premium over the 9-10 Index for the 1982-1995 period. We show that both the investment rules and the trade strategy components of the Fund's design contribute significantly to this return difference.

We provide an explanation for hedging as a means of allocating rather than reducing risk. We argue that when increases in total risk are costly, firms optimally allocate risk by reducing (increasing) exposure to risks that provide zero (positive) economic rents. Our evidence shows that mutual thrifts that convert to stock institutions increase total risk following conversion, consistent with their increased abilities and incentives for risk taking. They achieve this increase by hedging interest-rate risk and increasing credit risk. We provide some evidence that risk-management activities are related to growth capacity and management compensation structure attained at conversion.

This paper examines the optimal consumption and investment problem for a ‘large’ investor, whose portfolio choices affect the instantaneous expected returns on the traded assets. Alternatively, our analysis can be interpreted in terms of an optimal growth problem with nonlinear technologies. Existence of optimal policies is established using martingale and duality techniques under general assumptions on the securities' price process and the investor's preferences. As an illustration of our characterization result, explicit solutions are provided for specific examples involving an agent with logarithmic utilities and a generalized two-factor version of the CCAPM is derived. The analogy of the consumption problem examined in this paper to the consumption problem with constraints on the portfolio choices is emphasized.

This article solves the equilibrium problem in a pure-exchange, continuous-time economy in which some agents face information costs or other types of frictions effectively preventing them from investing in the stock market. Under the assumption that the restricted agents have logarithmic utilities, a complete characterization of equilibrium prices and consumption/investment policies is provided. A simple calibration shows that the model can help resolve some of the empirical asset pricing puzzles.

Commercial paper sells at an extra discount if it matures in the next calendar year but Treasury bills do not. The discount is apparent in downward price shifts before the year-end, and upward price shifts at the turn of the year that are significantly correlated with the simultaneous returns to small stocks, and that cannot reflect tax-loss selling. Cross-sectional and time-series tests on prices, as well as flow of funds evidence on trades by institutional investors, indicate that both the debt and equity patterns reflect agency problems related to portfolio disclosures.

This study explores multivariate methods for investment analysis based on return histories that differ in length across assets. The longer histories provide greater information about moments of return, not only for the longer-history assets, but for the shorter-history assets as well. To account for the remaining parameter uncertainty, or ‘estimation risk’, portfolio opportunities are characterized by a Bayesian predictive distribution. Examples involving emerging markets demonstrate the value of using the combined sample of histories and accounting for estimation risk, as compared to truncating the sample to produce equal-length histories or ignoring estimation risk by using maximum-likelihood estimates.

Previous studies have provided convincing evidence of improvements in the performance of companies that undergo leveraged buyouts (LBOs). This article presents evidence from the authors' recent study of the performance of 90 “reverse LBOs–LBO firms that go public again in an IPO—after they return to public ownership. The aim of the study was to track the performance of reverse LBOs and to reveal any association between operating performance and changes in leverage and equity ownership.
Among the principal findings of the study were the following: Despite a substantial decline in leverage ratios and equity ownership by insiders at the time of the IPOs, equity ownership of reverse LBOs remained more concentrated and leverage higher than that of public companies in the same industries.
The operating performance of reverse LBOs was significantly better than that of the median firm in their industries in the year prior to and in the year of the IPO. Although there is some evidence of a deterioration in the performance of the reverse-LBO firms, they continue to outperform their industry competitors for at least four full fiscal years after the IPO.
Greater reductions in the percentage equity owned by managers and other insiders at the time of the reverse LBO are associated with larger declines in operating performance.
The stock price performance of reverse LBOs after going public appears more “rational” than that of other IPOs—that is, there is less initial under pricing and no sign of the negative, longer-term abnormal returns reported by recent studies of IPOs.

This paper examines the intertemporal optimal consumption and investment problem in the presence of a stochastic endowment and constraints on the portfolio choices. Short-sale and borrowing constraints, as well as incomplete markets, can be modeled as special cases of the class of constraints we consider. Existence of optimal policies is established under fairly general assumptions on the security price coefficients and the individual's utility function. This result is obtained by using martingale techniques to reformulate the individual's dynamic optimization problem as an equivalent static one. An explicit characterization of equilibrium risk premia in the presence of portfolio constraints is also provided. In the unconstrained case, this characterization reduces to Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: G11, G12, C61, D52, D91.
* This is a revised version of the second chapter of my doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley. Financial support from the Haas School of Business is gratefully acknowledged. I thank Hua He and JakImage a CvitaniImage for several conversations on this topic and Darrell Duffie, Christina Shannon, Jiang Wang, Fernando Zapatero, and seminar participants at the Courant Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), the 1995 meeting of the Western Finance Association, the 1995 meeting of the European Finance Association, the 1995 INFORMS Applied Probability Conference, and the 1996 CIRANO/CRM Workshop on the Mathematics of Finance for comments. JakImage a CvitaniImage pointed out a mistake in an early version of this paper. I am of course solely responsible for any remaining errors.

We examine the accounting and market performance of reverse leveraged buyouts (i.e., firms making their first public offering after previously completing a leveraged buyout). On average, the accounting performance of these firms is significantly better than their industries at the time of the initial public offering (IPO) and for at least the following four years, though there is some evidence of a decline in performance. Cross-sectional variation in accounting performance subsequent to the IPO is related to changes in the equity ownership of both operating management and other insiders, and is unrelated to changes in leverage. Finally, there is no evidence of abnormal common stock performance after the reverse leveraged buyout.

Sample evidence about the predictability of monthly stock returns is considered from the perspective of a risk-averse Bayesian investor who must allocate funds between stocks and cash. The investor uses the sample evidence to update prior beliefs about the parameters in a regression of stock returns on a set of predictive variables. The regression relation can seem weak when described by usual statistical measures, but the current values of the predictive variables can exert a substantial influence on the investor's portfolio decision, even when the investor's prior beliefs are weighted against predictability.

This article develops a model of the upstairs market where order size, beliefs, and prices are determined endogenously. We test the model’s predictions using unique data for 5,625 equity trades during the period 1985 to 1992 that are known to be upstairs transactions and are identified as either buyer or seller initiated. We find that price movements prior to the trade date are significantly positively related to trade size, consistent with information leakage as the block is “shopped” upstairs. Further, the temporary price impact or liquidity effect is a concave function of order size, which may result from upstairs intermediation.

This paper examines empirically whether the short-swing rule (Section 16b of the Securities Exchange Act) deters managers from trading before mergers. Since a merger forces the sale of the target's outstanding equity, insider purchases within six months before the merger cannot escape this rule. We examine the 1941–1961 period when no other insider trading laws were enforced. Consistent with 16b's deterrent effect, managers' purchases drop significantly before the announcement. Before completion, the decrease occurs only in the 1941–1955 period. Surprisingly, pre-announcement sales do not decline, even though 16b cannot punish deferral of planned sales.

We examine whether the structure of compensation for the divisional CEO is related to subsequent innovative activity within the division, and whether the divisional CEO's compensation is structured as a function of the expected innovation opportunity set facing the division. Both the expected innovation opportunity set and the divisional executive's compensation contract are treated as endogenous variables by adopting a simultaneous equation approach. We find modest evidence that the proportion of total compensation tied to long-term components has a positive relation with future innovation, but no evidence that this proportion has a positive relation with the expected innovation opportunity set.

The Capital Asset Pricing Model implies that (i) the market portfolio is efficient and (ii) expected returns are linearly related to betas. Many do not view these implications as separate, since either implies the other, but we demonstrate that either can hold nearly perfectly while the other fails grossly. If the index portfolio is inefficient, then the coefficients and R2 from an ordinary least squares regression of expected returns on betas can equal essentially any values and bear no relation to the index portfolio's mean-variance location. That location does determine the outcome of a mean-beta regression fitted by generalized least squares.

Using confidential data of executive-specific short-term bonus plans, we investigate the extent to which executives manipulate earnings to maximize the present value of bonus plan payments. As such, this paper extends the work of Healy (1985). Like Healy, we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that managers manipulate earnings downwards when their bonuses are at their maximum. Unlike Healy, we find no evidence that managers manipulate earnings downwards when earnings are below the minimum necessary to receive any bonus. We demonstrate that Healy's results at the lower bound are likely to be induced by his methodology.

A Bayesian approach is used to investigate a sample's information about a portfolio's degree of inefficiency. With standard diffuse priors, posterior distributions for measures of portfolio inefficiency can concentrate well away from values consistent with efficiency, even when the portfolio is exactly efficient in the sample. The data indicate the that the NYSE-AMEX market portfolio is rather inefficient in the presence of a riskless asset, although this conclusion is justified only after an anslysis using informative priors. Including a riskless asset significantly reduces any sample's ability to produce posterior distributions supporting small degrees of inefficiency.

The article looks at accounting research on estimations and valuations of environmental liabilities for financial and managerial accounting in relation to Superfund sites. When valuing organizations which may be subject to environmental costs one must estimate the valuation implications and the incorporated accruals in the financial statement. Also, discussion of whether or not projected environmental costs which are associated to the cleanup of Superfund sites can be estimated using characteristics of the sites at various points.

We test the theory of the term structure of indexed-bond prices due to Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (CIR). The econometric method uses Hansen's generalized method of moments and exploits the probability distribution of the single-state variable in CIR's model, thus avoiding the use of aggregate consumption data. It enables us to estimate a continuous-time model based on discretely sampled data. The tests indicate that CIR's model for index bonds performs reasonably well when confronted with short-term Treasury-bill returns. The estimates indicate that term premiums are positive and that yield curves can take several shapes. However, the fitted model does poorly in explaining the serial correlation in real Treasury-bill returns.

We examine the profitability of a trading strategy which is based on a logit model designed to predict the sign of subsequent twelve-month excess returns from accounting ratios. Over the 1978–1988 period, the average annual excess return produced by the trading strategy ranges between 4.3% and 9.5%, depending on the specific measure of excess return and weighting scheme involved. However, our implementation of the Ou and Penman (1989) trading strategy in the 1978–1988 period, which is based on a logit model that predicts subsequent unexpected earnings- per-share from accounting ratios, does not earn excess returns.

This paper examines daily excess bond returns associated with announcements of additions to Standard and Poor's Credit Watch List, and to rating changes by Moody's and Standard and Poor's. Reliably nonzero average excess bond returns are observed for additions to Standard and Poor's Credit Watch List when an expectations model is used to classify additions as either expected or unexpected. Bond price effects are also observed for actual downgrade and upgrade announcements by rating agencies. Excluding announcements with concurrent disclosures weakens the results for downgrades, but not upgrades. The stock price effects of rating agency announcements are also examined and contrasted with the bond price effects.

A representative-agent model with time-varying moments of consumption growth is used to analyze implications about means and volatilities of asset returns as well as the predictability of asset returns for various investment horizons. A comparative-statics analysis using nonexpectedutility preferences indicates that, although risk aversion is important in determining the means of both equity returns and interest rates, implications about the volatility and the predictability of equity returns are affected primarily by intertemporal substitution. Lower elasticities of intertemporal substitution are associated with greater variance in the temporary component of equity prices.

The paper investigates how quickly prices attain new equilibrium levels after large-block transactions, and measures the associated temporary and permanent price effects. We find that prices adjust within at most three trades, with most of the adjustment occurring in the first trade. The temporary price effect for seller-initiated transactions is related to block size, but the temporary price effect observed for buyer-initiated transactions is no larger than that observed in 100 share trades. Most of the price effect associated with block trades is permanent and is related to block size, regardless of the initiating party.

We find that conditional means and variances of consumption growth vary through time, and this variation appears to be associated with the business cycle. A pricing model with fluctuating means and variances of consumption growth provides implications about conditional moments of returns for both short and long investment horizons, and these implications are explored empirically. The U-shaped pattern of first-order autocorrelations of returns, as well as business cycle patterns in the price of risk, appears to be consistent with the model, but our exploration suggests that other implications about conditional return moments are at odds with the data.

Three alternative, but not mutually exclusive, perspectives on accounting method choice are contrasted: the opportunistic behavior, efficient contracting, and information perspectives. Much of the empirical work on accounting method choice is based on the opportunistic behavior perspective. The Malmquist and Main and Smith papers are attempts to view accounting method choice as a means of improving the monitoring capabilities of contracts which rely on accounting numbers. The papers serve as useful vehicles for illustrating the difficulties of delineating a set of maintained assumptions that result in hypotheses about how accounting method choice affects the monitoring characteristics of contracts, and distinguishing between hypotheses based on the three perspectives on accounting method choice.

This paper presents a partially revealing rational expectations model of competitive trading to identify two effects of information releases; an informedness effect and a consensus effect. The informedness effect measures the extent to which agents become more knowledgeable, and the consensus effect measures the extent of agreement among agents at the time of an information release. We demonstrate that informedness and consensus generally occur jointly when information is disseminated, and that unexpected price changes and trading volume are each influenced by both informedness and consensus. Thus, interpretations of unexpected price changes and volume associated with information releases are conceptually similar. Since informedness and consensus each affect both the variance of price changes and volume, our paper provides an economic rationale for examining both price and volume effects at the time of information releases.

We investigate the cross-sectional relation between dividend yield and expected return and attempt to include various effects of changing risk measures and changing risk premiums. A stock’s risk is measured by its sensitivities to two factors, a market factor and a changing-risk-premium factor. After analyzing dividend-related changes in risk measures, we investigate the presence of dividend effects in expected returns using four methods, each imposing a different structure on the temporal behavior of risk measures and risk premiums. For each method, we find no reliable cross-sectional relation between dividend yield and risk-adjusted expected return.

The paper focuses on two countries, Japan and the U.S., to test the integration of capital markets. In Japan, the enactment of the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law in December of 1980 amounted to a true regime switch that virtually eliminated capital controls. Using multifactor asset pricing models, we show that the price of risk in the U.S. and Japanese stock markets was different before, but not after, the liberalization. This evidence supports the view that governments are the source of international capital market segmentation.

This article presents a mean-variance framework for likelihood-ratio tests of asset pricing models. A pricing model is tested by examining the position of one or more reference portfolios in sample mean-standard-deviation space. Included are tests of both single-beta and multiple-beta relations, with or without a riskless asset, using either a general or a specific alternative hypothesis. Tests with a factor that is not a portfolio return are also included. The mean-variance framework is illustrated by testing the zero-beta CAPM, a two-beta pricing model, and the consumption-beta model.

Earlier evidence concerning the relation between stock returns and the effects of size and earnings to price ratio (E/P) is not clear-cut. This paper re-examines these two effects with (a) a substantially longer sample period, 1951-1986, (b) data that are reasonably free of survivor biases, (c) both portfolio and seemingly unrelated regression tests, and (d) an emphasis on the important differences between January and other months. Over the entire period, the earnings yield effect is significant in both January and the other eleven months. Conversely, the size effect is significantly negative only in January. We also find evidence of consistently high returns for firms of all sizes with negative earnings.

The empirical implications of the consumption-oriented capital asset pricing model (CCAPM) are examined, and its performance is compared with a model based on the market portfolio. The CCAPM is estimated after adjusting for measurement problems associated with reported consumption data. The CCAPM is tested using betas based on both consumption and the portfolio having the maximum correlation with consumption. As predicted by the CCAPM, the market price of risk is significantly positive, and the estimate of the real interest rate is close to zero. The performances of the traditional CAPM and the CCAPM are about the same.

Returns computed with closing bid or ask prices that may not represent ‘true’ prices introduce
measurement error into portfolio returns if investor buying and selling display systematic patterns. This paper finds systematic tendencies for closing prices to be recorded at the bid in December and at the ask in early January. After changing bid and ask prices are controlled for. this pattern results in large portfolio returns on the two trading days surrounding the end of the year.
especially for low-price stocks. Other temporal return patterns (e.g.. weekend and holiday effects)
are also related to systematic trading patterns.

The article focuses on the effect sequential information releases has on the variance of price changes in an intertemporal market. It examines price change variances in markets consisting of a single risky asset as well as for two cross-sectionally independent risky assets. It mentions that unexpected price changes can be a function of a market's priors concerning liquidation dividends of the two risky assets, such as variance/covariance matrix and expected values. It states that the covariance in liquidating dividends had no unambiguous comparative statics.

Term-structure models from Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985) imply that conditional expected discrete-period returns on discount instruments are linear functions of forward rates. Tests reject a single-latent-variable model of expected returns on U.S. Treasury bills, but two or three latent variables appear to describe expected returns on bills of all maturities. Expected returns estimated using two-latent-variables exhibit variation with business cycles similar to what Fama (1986) observes for forward rates. Inverted term structures precede recessions and upward-sloping structures precede recoveries.

This paper documents the effects of large (block) transactions on the prices of common stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange. We examine whether mean temporary and permanent price effects associated with large and small transactions differ and whether the price effects vary cross-sectionally according to the size of the block. Alternative definitions of block size are investigated – percentage of the equity traded, block volume in relation to normal trading volume, and dollar value of the block. The results suggest that price effects are predominantly temporary for seller-initiated transactions and permanent for buyer-initiated transactions.

This paper examines the relation between stock returns and stock market volatility. We find evidence that the expected market risk premium (the expected return on a stock portfolio minus the Treasury bill yield) is positively related to the predictable volatility of stock returns. There is also evidence that unexpected stock market returns are negatively related to the unexpected change in the volatility of stock returns. This negative relation provides indirect evidence of a positive relation between expected risk premiums and volatility.

This paper investigates the extent to which models based on financial and market variables predict auditors' decisions to issue qualified audit reports in situations involving contingencies or uncertainties. A probit model is developed with the dependent variable indicating whether the firm received a qualified opinion, and the independent variables representing publicly available financial and market variables. The estimated model distinguishes between unqualified (clean) opinions and first-time qualifications and between types of qualifications (e.g., going concern, litigation, asset realizing, and multiple qualifications) in the year of the qualification, for both an estimation sample and a holdout sample. The predictive accuracy of the estimated model is evaluated in terms of misclassification costs for alternative costs of type I and type II errors and for specific prior probabilities of qualified and clean opinions.

Tests of asset-pricing models are developed that allow expected risk premiums and market betas to vary over time. These tests exploit the relation between expected excess returns and current market values. Using weekly data for 1963 through 1982 on ten common stock portfolios formed according to equity capitalization, a single-risk-premium model is not rejected if the expected premium is time varying and is not constrained to correspond to a market factor. Conditional mean-variance efficiency of a value-weighted stock index is rejected, and the rejection is insensitive to how much variability of expected risk premiums is assumed.

We characterize the sets of mimicking positions with returns that can serve in place of factors in an exact K-factor arbitrage-pricing relation for a set of N assets. All of the sets are K-dimensional nonsingular linear transformations of each other. We interpret three examples of such transformations and discuss empirical considerations. We provide conditions under which the mimicking positions can be expressed as portfolios, and we characterize the relation between mimicking portfolios and the minimum-variance frontier.

A framework is presented for investigating the mean-variance efficiency of an unobservable portfolio based on its correlation with a proxy portfolio. A sensitivity analysis derives the highest correlation between the proxy and a portfolio that reverses the inference of a test of SHarpe-Lintner tangency. For example, the maximum correlation between the value-weighted NYSE-AMEX portfolio and a portfolio inferred tangent ranges from 0.76 to 0.48. We also test whether the correlation between the proxy and the tangent portfolio exceeds a given level. This hypothesis is often rejected for the NYSE-AMEX proxy at a correlation of 0.7.

Several predetermined variables that reflect levels of bond and stock prices appear to predict returns on common stocks of firms of various sizes, long-term bonds of various default risks, and default-free bonds of various maturities. The returns on small-firm stocks and low-grade bonds are more highly correlated in January than in the rest of the year with previous levels of asset prices, especially prices of small-firm stocks. Seasonality is found in several conditional risk measures, but such seasonality is unlikely to explain, and in some cases is opposite to, the seasonal found in mean returns.

The evidence in this paper suggests that downgrades by both Moody's and Standard and Poor's are associated with negative abnormal stock returns in the two-day window beginning the day of the press release by the rating agency. Significant negative abnormal performance can still be detected after eliminating observations containing obvious concurrent (potentially contaminating) news releases. There is little evidence of abnormal performance on announcement of an upgrade. Significant abnormal returns are associated with announcements of additions to the Standard and Poor's Credit Watch List, if either a potential downgrade or a potential upgrade is indicated.

Differential returns on dividend and capital gains income, systematic abnormal returns
surrounding ex-dividend dates, excess returns on small versus large capitalimtion stocks,
excess returns on low versus high price-earnings ratio stocks—these are among the recent
findings that cast doubt on the traditional Capital Asset Pricing Model and tease investors
with the promise of systematic excess returns.
Some of these effects are undoubtedly related. Tests indicate, for example, that the higher a
portfolio's price to book ratio, the higher the corresponding values of market capitalization,
P/E and stock price. Furthermore, P/E, dividend yield, price and P/E effects all experience
significant January seasonals. What has not been conclusively determined is whether the
effects are additive. So far, it appears that the dividend yield and size effects are not mutually
exclusive. Investors may want to use a strategy employing several of these characteristics,
rather than one.
Efforts to explain the size effect have focused on January, because the effect is concentrated
in that month. The most common hypothesis attributes this to year-end tax-loss selling, but
the evidence is less than conclusive. Evidence strongly suggests, however, that, among small
firms, those with the largest abnormal returns tend to be the firms that have recently became
small, that either don't pay dividends or have higher dividend yields, and that have lower
prices and low P/E ratios.

This paper contains evidence of a significant negative stock price reaction to media disclosures of ‘subject to’ qualified audit opinions. Disclosures of qualifications in the financial news media (the Wall Street Journal and the Broad Tape) are rare relative to the frequency of audit qualifications. Other studies do not detect an impact of qualified opinions on stock prices. None of the explanations for the difference in the results between this study and prior studies is consistent with the data. We are unable to draw strong inferences because we cannot identify the selection process that produces the sample of media disclosures.

Empirical tests are reported for Ross' arbitrage pricing theory using monthly data for U.S. Treasury securities during the 1960-1979 period. We find that mean returns on bond portfolios are linearly related to at least two factor loadings. Multivariate test results, however, are not consistent with the APT. Our sample data in the U.S. Treasury securities market are also not consistent with either version of the CAPM. One-month-ahead forecasts of excess returns using factor-generating models are compared with corresponding naive predictions or predictions using the "market model" with various market portfolios.

This study examines the empirical relation between stock returns and (long-run) dividend yields. The findings show that much of the phenomenon is due to a nonlinear relation between dividend yields and returns in January. Regression coefficients on dividend yields, which some models predict should be non-zero due to differential taxation of dividends and capital gains, exhibit a significant January seasonal, even when controlling for size. This finding is significant since there are no provisions in the after-tax asset pricing models that predict the tax differential is more important in January than in other months.

This study uses a longer time period and additional stocks to further investigate the weekend effect. We find consistently negative Monday returns (1) for the S & P Composite as early as 1928, (2) for Exchange-traded stocks of firms of all sizes, and (3) for actively traded over-the-counter (OTC) stocks. The OTC results are based on bid prices and therefore appear to reject specialist-related explanations. For the 30 individual stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Index, the average correlation between Friday and Monday returns is positive and the highest of all pairs of successive days. The latter finding is inconsistent with fairly general measurement-error explanations.

This paper demonstrates that the Roll and Ross (RR) and other previously published tests of the APT are subject to several basic limitations. There is a general nonequivalence of factor analyzing small groups of securities and factor analyzing a group of securities sufficiently large for the APT model to hold. It is found that as one increases the number of securities, the number of "factors" determined increases. This increase in the number of "factors" with larger groups of securities cannot readily be explained by a distinction between "priced" and "nonpriced" risk factors as it is impermissible to carry out tests on whether a given "risk factor is priced" using factor analytic procedures

We investigate whether announcements of ‘subject to’ audit opinions and disclaimers of opinions affect stock prices. The results indicate that many firms experience negative abnormal performance prior to the release of qualified opinions, and that the magnitude of prior abnormal performance differs across types of qualifications. However, there is little evidence of a stock price effect when qualifications are disclosed publicly. It is difficult to construct powerful tests of the announcement effect of a qualified opinion for three reasons. First, the announcement date of the qualification is not easily identified. Second, measuring the unanticipated component of the announcement requires a model of market expectations. Third, controls must be employed for concurrent disclosures. The problems concerning event date identification have ramifications for other accounting event studies, particularly studies of disclosures typically contained in the annual report or 10-K.

Previous estimates of a ‘size effect’ based on daily returns data are biased. The use of quoted closing prices in computing returns on individual stocks imparts an upward bias. Returns computed for buy-and-hold portfolios largely avoid the bias induced by closing prices. Based on such buy-and-hold returns, the full-year size effect is half as large as previously reported, and all of the full-year effect is, on average, due to the month of January.

The Arbitrage Pricing Theory is extended to a setting where investors possess information about future asset returns. A no-arbitrage pricing restriction is obtained with arbitrage conditioned on an investor's information. The pricing restriction contains unconditional factor loadings and either conditional or unconditional expected returns. Thus, tests of the theory can be based solely on time-series estimates of unconditional moments. Additional tests based on conditional expected returns are also appropriate.

A ‘tax-loss selling’ hypothesis has frequently been advanced to explain the ‘January effect’ reported in this issue by Keim. This paper concludes that U.S. tax laws do not unambiguously predict such an effect. Since Australia has similar tax laws but a July-June tax year, the hypothesis predicts a small-firm July premium. Australian returns show pronounced December-January and July-August seasonals, and a premium for the smallest-lirm decile of about four percent per month across all months. This contrasts with the U.S. data in which the small-firm premium is concentrated in January. We conclude that the relation between the U.S. tax year and the January seasonal may be more correlation than causation.

In this paper, we review research into the economic consequences of voluntary and mandatory choices of accounting techniques and standards. We discuss how the predictions of extant economic consequence theories are driven by contracting and monitoring costs associated with management compensation contracts, bond covenants, regulation, and/or political visibility. We review empirical tests of economic consequence theories, categorize those tests, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. The empirical tests reveal two systematic associations with accounting choice: size, a proxy for political visibility, and leverage, a proxy for contracting and monitoring costs of lending agreements. Interpretation of the results is difficult, due to general limitations of the tests. We conclude by suggesting some directions for future research, based on our analysis of the potential payoffs associated with different types of empirical tests.

Andrew B Abel, "Comment on 'Financing Private Business in an Inflationary Context: The Experience of Argentina between 1976 and 1980'". In Financial Policies and the World Capital Market, edited by Pedro Aspe, Rudiger Dornbusch, (1983), 183 - 185.

Andrew B Abel, "Comment on 'Financing Private Business in an Inflationary Context: The Experience of Argentina between 1976 and 1980'". In Financial Policies and the World Capital Market, edited by Pedro Aspe, Rudiger Dornbusch, (1983), 183 - 185.

This study addresses a problem that can arise when a broader market index is used to test the CAPM: a return series used in the index can exclude part of an asset's return. If the excluded return is constant, then a test of mean-variance efficiency can be constructed, but an additional parameter must be estimated. This point is illustrated in tests with both broader market indexes and stocks-only indexes. The broader indexes exclude the rental return on real estate and durables. The excluded rental return is estimated under the assumption that the index portfolio is mean-variance efficient.

This study examines, month-by-month, the empirical relation between abnormal returns and
market value of NYSE and AMEX common stocks. Evidence is provided that daily abnormal
return distributions in January have large means relative to the remaining eleven months, and
that the relation between abnormal returns and size is always negative and more pronounced in
January than in any other month - even in years when, on average, large firms earn larger
risk-adjusted returns than small firms. In particular. nearly fifty percent of the average
magnitude of the ‘size effect’ over the period 1963-1979 is due to January abnormal returns.
Further, more than lifty percent of the January premium is attributable to large abnormal
returns during the first week of trading in the year, particularly on the first trading day.

This study investigates the sensitivity of tests of the CAPM to different sets of asset returns. Tests are conducted with market portfolios that include returns for bonds, real estate, and consumer durables in addition to common stocks. Even when stocks represent only 10% of the portfolio's value, inferences about the CAPM are virtually identical to those obtained with a stocks-only portfolio. In contrast, inferences are sensitive to the set of assets used in the tests.

Provisions of bond indenture agreements and management compensation contracts are examined to derive testable implications concerning management's incentives to choose among alternative accounting techniques. The hypotheses are subjected to empirical examination by investigating the voluntary change from accelerated to straight-line depreciation for financial reporting purposes only. The methodology utilized incorporates an expectations model of accounting earnings in an attempt to separate out of the effects of earnings announcements from accounting change announcements which are often concurrent. The evidence from both price and non-price data is not consistent with the general hypothesis that bond covenants and management compensation contracts are important determinants of the decision to change depreciation techniques. Five potential explanations for the results are offered.

This paper atternpts to reodel transition probabilities of intergenerational occupational mobility for British and Danish data. A bivarinte normal status distribution is tried but rejected. A simpic bivariate Gumbei model. with only one unknown parameter that determines the social mobility process, appears to provide a satisfactory fit for both sets of data.